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Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow in Suspiria de Profundis and the Dream Fugue in the Mail Coach are among the most musical, the most poetic, and the most imaginative of the author's productions. General Characteristics. De Quincey's essays show versatility, scholarly exactness, and great imaginative power. His fame, however, rests in a large degree upon his style.
Higher than either wiser than both put together is that noble statement with which Jean Paul begins his fine essay on the education of girls in "Levana." "Before being a wife or mother, one is a human being; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can overbalance or replace the human, but must become its means, not end.
He points out, too, the importance of noticing the habits which come from spontaneous self-employment, which may be habits of indolent ease if the child is not allowed to be as active as his nature requires. There were no theories of play in Froebel's day, but he had certainly read Levana, and in all probability he knew what Schiller had said in his Letters on Aesthetic Education.
Before this, the already old experiments of Dorfmeister had shown that the same chrysalis, according as it was submitted to cold or heat, gave rise to very different butterflies, which had long been regarded as independent species, Vanessa levana and Vanessa prorsa: an intermediate temperature produces an intermediate form.
Neither age, sex, nor station afforded any protection against these furies, who perpetrated barbarities the details of which would exceed belief. The reader of German literature will call to mind the anecdote, in Jean Paul's Levana, of a Moldavian woman who in one day slew seven men with her own hand, and the same evening was delivered of a child.
On the bier was borne the unfinished manuscript of Selina, an essay on immortality. Sixty students with lighted torches escorted the procession. Other students bore, displayed, Levana and the Introduction to Esthetics. Sixteen years after Richter's death the King of Bavaria erected a statue to him in Bayreuth.
What Levana says of the use and abuse of philology and about the study of history as a preparation for political action is no less significant. Goethe, who had been reticent of praise in regard to the novels, found in Levana "the boldest virtues without the least excess." From the education of children for life Richter turned naturally to the education of his fellow Germans for citizenship.
This experience he was to turn to good account in Levana and in his first novel, The Invisible Lodge, in which the unsympathetic figure of Röper is undoubtedly meant to present the not very gracious personality of the Kommerzienrat. To this period belongs a collection of Aphorisms whose bright wit reveals deep reflection. They show a maturing mind, keen insight, livelier and wider sympathies.
Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all the nations he has seen than by his nurse." Levana. Emile et Sophie, i. For an account of some of these, see Grimm's Corr. Lit., iii. 211, 252, 347, etc. Also Corr. Inéd., p. 143.
He tells, too, of his rapture at his first A B C book and its gilded cover, and of his eagerness at school, until his too-anxious father took him from contact with the rough peasant boys and tried to educate him himself, an experience not without value, at least as a warning, to the future author of Levana. But if the Richters were proud, they were very poor.
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